soapUI:org.apache.http.client.ClientProtocolException

When I downloaded the soapUI Pro official build (4.5.1), the first thing I tried to do was test some of our services on the test environment.  All of our WCF services are protected by NTLM authentication.  Unfortunately I immediately hit a wall.  Every attempt to call a services threw the following un-handled exception:

Error getting response; org.apache.http.client.ClientProtocolException

The only useful hint I found in the error log was this line:

Caused by: org.apache.http.ProtocolException: Content-Length header already present

I spent quite a bit of time fiddling with the services configuration, attempting to call the service on other environments, and generally troubleshooting the issue inside of soapUI.  The good part of this was it helped me learn the UI a little better, the bad part was I made no progress on solving the issue.

After searching on this error I found a post where someone else had encountered the same problem.  The recommendation for fixing it was to download the latest nightly build.

Apparently it was a bug that was fixed after the current release, because downloading the latest build completely resolved the issue and soapUI worked against our services the first time.

I’m not sure if the issue is related to NTLM, WCF, or a combination.  Hopefully this post saves someone a little troubleshooting time… but not before they get a chance to learn the UI a little better by trying to fix the issue!  :-)